Zend Blueprint for Continuous Delivery
Fundamentals of
Continuous Integration
Jenkins
with
and
server
by Slavey Karadzhov
Fundamentals of Continuous Integration with Jenkins and Zend Server
Introduction
Continuous Delivery is a methodology, a mindset change and a leadership practice that focuses on how to
achieve rapid application delivery throughout the software application lifecycle. This relies on the adoption of
automation to streamline manual processes and enforce consistency and repeatability in the software delivery
pipeline, as well as enhanced collaboration and shared metrics and processes across Dev and Ops teams [1].
One of the fundamental requirements for establishing Continuous Delivery is the implementation of an
automated Continuous Integration system that automatically and consistently builds the application from
code components and resources to a deployable package.
This paper will demonstrate the steps and advantages of implementing a Continuous Integration system
utilizing Jenkins and the Zend Server Continuous Delivery platform.
The Zend Blueprint for Continuous Delivery
Zend’s Blueprint for Continuous Delivery codifies best practices for implementing each
step of the software delivery cycle and provides patterns, integrated with Zend Server,
(Zend’s platform for Continuous Delivery of PHP applications), that help implement
those best practices.
The Blueprint provides guidelines on the underlying infrastructure should be
constructed to deliver optimal value. The goal is to implement practical approaches
that will accelerate and strengthen each step in the process of bringing applications
more rapidly from code to production.
Learn more
about the
Blueprint
www.zend.com/
continuousdelivery
This model for Continuous Delivery is based on practical implementation concepts
gathered through the experience of the Zend Professional Services team in working
with numerous large and small clients.
The Continuous Delivery Blueprint
Version
Control
Developers
working in
branches.
Trigger CI
when
merging
into main
master
branch/
trunk
2
Continuous Integration
Build
Code Quality
Packaging
Pull and
organize
application
artifacts and
dependencies
Run unit tests
and static
code analysis
tools to
ensure code
quality
Assemble
application
artifacts
including
dependencies
& configuration
into deployable
validated
package
Infrastructure
Automation
Release
Automation
Quality
Control &
Approvals
Automated
provisioning
of
infrastructure
resources &
platforms
Automated
application
deployment
across all
runtime
environments
Project
specific
functional
testing &
production
sign-off
Application
Management
Provide
instant
feedback and
diagnostics
on deployed
application to
development
and
operations
teams
Zend Technologies, Inc. · www.zend.com
Fundamentals of Continuous Integration with Jenkins and Zend Server
Continuous Integration: The Fundamentals
A key principle of a Continuous Delivery approach is that the application is always production ready. This
means that all artifacts required to build the application are stored and managed in a version control system,
and that code must be consistently and regularly checked in to the source mainline to ensure small increments
between builds. Basically, the code in mainline is expected to be continuously production ready.
There are three important and foundational elements that underpin any Continuous Integration System.
1. Commitment to building tests. The first is one of the most important elements; the commitment of the
development team to produce a comprehensive test suite at the unit level and functional level together
with their code. This is essential to achieve the “guaranteed” level of code quality that can be production
ready at any moment.
2. Never break the build. The goal is that the application must be ready to be built, packaged and deployed
on every committed change. This (of course), means that broken or untested code should never be
committed.
3. Version Control. Another foundational element to Continuous Integration is version control. To be ready
to focus on implementing Continuous Integration, the code has to be managed by strict version control
policies.
When the code is always production ready, managed by strict version control policies, and the development
team has adopted an agile development and unit testing practice, organizations can move to implement a
Continuous Integration environment.
Each distinct stage in the Continuous Delivery blueprint can be then implemented to complete the Continuous
Delivery workflow. Below is a sequence diagram explaining the suggested flow of steps in a Continuous
Delivery workflow.
Source control
Check in
New Code
Feedback
Check in
Fix
Continuous Integration
Build unit
tests
Package
& Deploy
Automated
acceptance tests
Trigger
Continuous
Integration Failure
Trigger
Continuous
Integration
Trigger
Automated
testing
Developers
User acceptance
tests
Failure
Diagnostics
Check in
Fix
Trigger
Trigger
Provision environment
and deploy application
Trigger
Production Feedback and diagnostics
3
Production
Promotion
Production
Approval
Zend Technologies, Inc. · www.zend.com
Fundamentals of Continuous Integration with Jenkins and Zend Server
Continuous Integration
The Continuous Integration approach is designed to create an automation environment ensuring that every
change to the application results in a releasable version, and that any version can be built automatically at
the push of a button. At a broader level, Continuous Delivery aims to make the entire end to end release
process of that application hands free (automated) where the built application (from Continuous Integration
system), is delivered frequently to the testing and then production environments. The goal of the Continuous
Delivery cycle is to ensure consistency and high quality by delivering fast user centric feedback [2]. Continuous
Integration is an important subset of Continuous Delivery.
The goal of Continuous Integration is to automate traditionally manual stages in the application development
process in which a feature complete version of the software is moving for the first time from development to
the system integration and integration testing phase.
With Continuous Integration, applications are built from a very early stage in the development process
at specific frequent intervals or on every change checked in by the developers. This effectively eliminates
the need for integration testing and the cost associated with developers spending time on this phase. The
enablement of frequent incremental builds and mandating a comprehensive automated testing process also
allows developers to detect problems early and as a result, ensure higher application quality.
To illustrate
a typical
Continuous
Integration
workflow,
consider the
following
scenario:
See illustration
on next page
1. During the development of the application, the developers are working
on their local machines and once they are ready to submit their new code
changes they commit them to the central source code repository. In the
diagram below the Source Control Management (or version control) system
is a Git repository.
2. When the code is checked in to the mainline (or the release manager merges
code changes from one of the developers), the new code addition to the
main branch triggers a new release.
3. The Continuous Integration system (Jenkins in this case) monitors the version
control system for changes and launches the build process.
4. The Continuous Integration server gets the source code from the repository.
5. The Continuous Integration server runs unit tests to validate the quality.
6. The Continuous Integration server packages the files into distributable units
and deploys the package onto a test server and validates the package and
basic functionality by running automated functional tests.
7. The Continuous Integration server deploys the same package on the testing
environments for thorough user acceptance testing.
8. Once the acceptance tests are successful the same package is deployed on
the production servers. Implementing infrastructure and release automation
enables end to end automation and allows provisioning and deploying the
application packages on all servers with a click of a button.
4
Zend Technologies, Inc. · www.zend.com
Fundamentals of Continuous Integration with Jenkins and Zend Server
Developers
commit
push
Source
Control
Clone “Master” Branch
Jenkins
Cl
Build
Unit
test
Code
Analysis
Packaging Validation
&
tests
Deploy
Testing
Staging
Production
Benefits of Zend Server and Jenkins Integration
Zend Server, when integrated with Jenkins, enables a completely automated delivery process from the
Continuous Integration system, into staging or production. Zend Server will automatically deploy the package
onto a server, or a group of servers, whether in staging or production. If the target server is part of a Zend Server
cluster, then all the other Zend Server nodes in the cluster will receive the same application and configuration
automatically. This capability to package and deploy all of the code and configuration and libraries required for
a PHP application onto a clustered environment in an automated manner also includes the ability to rollback
instantaneously across a cluster to previous application versions if required.
Zend Server also has the benefit of making it simple to ensure that a common and consistent application stack
and configurations are in place across dev, test and production. This includes library management capabilities
that ensure framework versions and other dependencies are correctly managed across each environment.
This makes it much easier to bring applications from Continuous Integration/ Development environment
into staging and production without issues. Zend Server also alerts the team to prevent errors caused by
configuration inconsistencies.
5
Zend Technologies, Inc. · www.zend.com
Fundamentals of Continuous Integration with Jenkins and Zend Server
Zend Server: A Platform for Continuous
Delivery of PHP Applications
The Zend blueprint for Continuous Delivery has the Zend Server application
platform at its core. Zend Server is designed to help deliver your apps rapidly,
iteratively and consistently.
Consistent. Automated. Collaborative. No problem.
Standardize packaging and deployment testing.
Instantly provision standardized application infrastructure.
Automate app deployment, versioning, and rollback.
Understand & fix production issues and iterate rapidly.
How does Zend Server enable Continuous Delivery?
DevOps Automation APIs
Continuous
Integration
PHP Stack
Consistency
Release
Automation
Infrastructure
Automation
Cluster Deployment
Automated Cluster
Provisioning
Dependencies &
Versioning
Error Detection
Automated Rollback
App and Library
Packaging
Auto-deploy
on Scale-Up
Cloud Elasticity
Application
Management
Metrics & Trends
Dashboards
Root Cause Analysis
Multi-Server
Config Mgmt.
Clustering & H/A
Auto scaling
Shared Dev/Ops
Visibility
Change Tracking &
Auditing
Optimized Stack – Acceleration, Caching, Job Queue
Complete PHP Runtime
Support & Security Fixes, Long term support
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Zend Technologies, Inc. · www.zend.com
Fundamentals of Continuous Integration with Jenkins and Zend Server
References and resources:
[1]
The Zend Blueprint for Continuous Delivery, Zend Technologies, www.zend.com/continuousdelivery
[2]
http://www.thoughtworks.com/de/continuous-delivery
About the Author
Slavey Karadzhov is a Senior Consultant at Zend Technologies. He is a PHP 5/5.3, Zend
Framework and MySQL Certified Engineer. Proud owner of two master degrees, in
Computer Science from Sofia University, Bulgaria and in Software Technologies from
Stuttgart University of Applied Science, Germany. Slavey is a strong open source
supporter and recognized software innovator as well as the author of a Zend Framework
2 book called “Learn ZF2: Learning By Example” (http://learnzf2.com).
Zend Professional Services lead implementations of agile methodologies, application
design, optimization and continuous delivery solutions at global enterprises running
mission-critical PHP applications. The consultants focus on mentoring customers’
development and operations teams to deliver faster releases of high-quality PHP
applications with higher performance and availability.
About Zend
Zend partners with businesses to rapidly deliver modern apps across web, mobile and
cloud. We helped establish the PHP language, which today powers over 200 million
applications and web sites. Our flagship offering, Zend Server, is the leading Application
Platform for developing, deploying and managing business-critical applications in PHP.
More than 40,000 companies rely on Zend solutions, including NYSE Euronext, BNP
Paribas, Bell Helicopter, France Telecom and other leading brands worldwide.
Corporate Headquarters: Zend Technologies, Inc. 19200 Stevens Creek Blvd. Cupertino, CA 95014, USA · Tel 1-408-253-8800 · Fax 1-408-253-8801
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